A Second Mortgage Disaster On Horizon?: “(CBS) When it comes to bailouts of American business, Barney Frank and the Congress may be just getting started. Nearly two trillion tax dollars have been shoveled into the hole that Wall Street dug and people wonder where the bottom is.

As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, it turns out the abyss is deeper than most people think because there is a second mortgage shock heading for the economy. In the executive suites of Wall Street and Washington, you’re beginning to hear alarm about a new wave of mortgages with strange names that are about to become all too familiar. If you thought sub-primes were insanely reckless wait until you hear what’s coming. “

(Via CBS.)

Here’s the video:

From the words of Whitney Tilson, an investment fund manager who’s doing some financial detective work with Amherst:

[One of the best guides to the danger ahead is Whitney Tilson. He's an investment fund manager who has made such a name for himself recently that investors, who manage about $10 billion, gathered to hear him last week. Tilson saw, a year ago, that sub-prime mortgages were just the start.

"We had the greatest asset bubble in history and now that bubble is bursting. The single biggest piece of the bubble is the U.S. mortgage market and we're probably about halfway through the unwinding and bursting of the bubble," Tilson explains. "It may seem like all the carnage out there, we must be almost finished. But there's still a lot of pain to come in terms of write-downs and losses that have yet to be recognized."

In 2007, Tilson teamed up with Amherst Securities, an investment firm that specializes in mortgages. Amherst had done some financial detective work, analyzing the millions of mortgages that were bundled into those mortgage-backed securities that Wall Street was peddling. It found that the sub-primes, loans to the least credit-worthy borrowers, were defaulting. But Amherst also ran the numbers on what were supposed to be higher quality mortgages.

"It was data we'd never seen before and that's what made us realize, 'Holy cow, things are gonna be much worse than anyone anticipates,'" Tilson says. ]

So it was in a recent SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) for FoodCycles (an urban farm/composting/aquaponics social enterprise) I was factoring in this possible piece of news. According to auditors or finance analysts in the US, this is a for sure thing. It’s coming. Brace for impact.

It will certainly spread out and make things worse here in Canada. Are there opportunities? Yes, plenty of people out there speculate. The thing is – even with the best guesses – you’ll only know for sure when you’re almost over the cliff edge.

High priced and luxury goods have already taken a serious hit. In the food sector, organics is doing okay because a lot of it is principle driven. Only time will tell.